


we wished for lakes been kissed by sun

by meritmut



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Post-Hobbit, Third Age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-07-14 00:52:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7145411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are young, thinks Galadriel, so young, you have only ever known starlight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we wished for lakes been kissed by sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).



> (title and quote from 'drown' by marika hackman; written for the prompt 'tauriel/galadriel, history')
> 
> and if I'm rough or coarse through to my edge  
> you can polish me for hours but I'll always look best in your head  
> we wished for lakes been kissed by sun, we found not one, hundreds, then some

She comes like a ghost out of the north, borne on the back of the wind like a storm from the hills and they have new names for her in their stories now, this blazing thing who is like nothing that has walked in Lórien before; fire-that-wanders-over-the-land, hewer of bats and goblin foe, she comes to the golden-wood with war still hot in her young bones (and you are _young,_ thinks Galadriel, _so young, you have only ever known starlight_ ) she is a ragged edge, an open wound of memory and grief torn from the woods that bore her and breaking her heart anew every day for it: she left half herself behind under the shadowed eaves of Eryn Galen and now she is lost, drifting, cut from her moorings somewhere between the dark earth and the stars.

She is a wild bloom of green in the autumn and her hair smells like hawthorn flowers, which do not grow in this forest; never have, in Lothlórien we garland our maidens in elanor and niphredil in memory of springtime but Tauriel walks beneath the trees and carries the reek of death and honey with her, a lethal grace in the soft tread of her white feet and her clear stare, and _there is nothing of the Sea in you, or perhaps there is too much of it in me._ There was a time when all those who walked in Lindórinand were of her kind but Galadriel never saw it - _we are not strong swimmers, we wood-Elves,_ they said to her once, _we cannot hold back the tide of you._

She remembers when the wood was more green than silver-gold, green and sweet-smelling with the high flush of summers never to come again, and the light struck molten against the gilded mellyrn-trunks and red fires sprang up with the onset of night and the Nandor who were here before gathered close about as all the shades of eventide enmeshed the forest, a time and a place that are gone from Middle-earth - a time she will not see again - but this red-touched thing digs her feet into the earth, dirt and mulch squeezing up between her freckled toes, nothing rots in her but what will grow again and - and perhaps it is not so final, this parting, when there are creatures like her who will go on.

She lifts her face to the treetops where the waves rush through and frowns. _It is too loud here,_ she murmurs, and _they do not sound like trees,_ and where is the sun's warmth, even in the Greenwood there is that, and when did _enchanted_ come to mean _half-alive?_

 _(I will go soon,_ you say, fingers deft in the flame-bright fall of your hair, _I will hie north, and home,_ and Lothlórien has been many things, it has been kingdom and fortress and _mine, mine,_ but that, has it ever been that?)

 _There is much still waiting for you, in this world,_ Galadriel's white fingers sketch a vague future from the air: her homeland is across the Sea, across an ocean wide of grief and exile and so many partings, but for you there is a different journey ahead. _We will leave this land before too long but you - you will see what comes after this night, you will live in the world yet to be born._

Tauriel lifts her hands to cup the fading daylight in her palms.

 _I am struggling just to live in this one,_ she is thinking longingly of home and her green eyes are shining now, it will never be any easier for her, to live, but perhaps it will not be so much harder than this and she must know - _Lady, tell me it will not always be this way. My heart is so heavy, tell me of the time that is to come. When this age ends, will there still be green and growing things in the one that comes after? Will there be sunrises and rainfall, birdsong and starlight? I could not long bear it without them._

It is not quite a vision, not a foreseeing that fills her mind with the image of a world still decades from its deliverance out of darkness, but it takes her with the force of a wide river's current anyway and Galadriel is lost to the sight of it; to the shifting clouds and the waning sunlight and the forests of the earth gone still, and the long quiet that will claim the land she has called her own for years beyond counting...

And Tauriel, arrayed in ink and silver light, pleading with the cold stars, _stay._

**Author's Note:**

> an attempt was made at keeping this five sentences


End file.
